Mastercard 'Hit by Wikileaks Revenge Attacks'

According to reports, Mastercard.com is currenlty down. Anon_operation, the hacktivists declaring ownership on the hack, have just tweeted that it's due to a DDOS attack.

Internet hacktivists are claiming to have brought down the Mastercard website as revenge for the firm withdrawing services to Wikileaks.

The Anonymous group of hackers are also said to have shot down the website belonging to the Swedish prosecutors office which is currently pursuing founder Julian Assange.

Anonymous is a group of hacktivists who refer to themselves as operation payback, with links to the notorious message board 4chan.

"We are glad to tell you that Mastercard is down and it's confirmed," the group tweeted.

Yesterday we reported that MasterCard had pulled the plug on donations to WikiLeaks, a move that would potentially dry up another source of funds for the embattled document-sharing Web site.

Chris Monteiro, spokesman for Mastercard said that MasterCard was cutting off payments because WikiLeaks is engaging in illegal activity. "MasterCard rules prohibit customers from directly or indirectly engaging in or facilitating any action that is illegal."

Mastercard has not yet confirmed the attack but security experts have said the site has been under a so-called distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), which swamp a site with so many requests that it becomes overwhelmed.